Gender, Otherness, and Culture in Medieval and Early Modern Art

255 Pages·2017·7.05 MB·English

by  Carlee A. Bradbury, Michelle Moseley-Christian (eds.)

T H E N E W M I D D L E A G E S
Gender Otherness
, , and
Culture Medieval
in
Early Modern Art
and
Edited by Carlee A. Bradbury
and Michelle Moseley-Christian
The New Middle Ages
Series Editor
Bonnie Wheeler
English & Medieval Studies
Southern Methodist University
Dallas, TX, USA
The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to pluridisciplinary studies
of medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s
history and on feminist and gender analyses. This peer-reviewed series
includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14239
Carlee A. Bradbury
Michelle Moseley-Christian
Editors
Gender, Otherness,
and Culture
in Medieval and Early
Modern Art
Editors
Carlee A. Bradbury Michelle Moseley-Christian
Department of Art School of Visual Arts
Radford University Virginia Tech
Radford, VA, USA Blacksburg, VA, USA
The New Middle Ages
ISBN 978-3-319-65048-7 ISBN 978-3-319-65049-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-65049-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950712
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
The image credit is: Artokoloro Quint Lox Limited/Alamy Stock Photo
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature
The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
P
reface
This project initially grew from a panel at the Southeastern College Art
Association held in the fall of 2012 in Greensboro, North Carolina.
The session was originally conceptualized as “Gender and Otherness
in Medieval Art,” but following response to a call for papers, it quickly
expanded to embrace a related early modern scope of inquiry. The range
of studies we encountered both at the conference and from the authors
who later joined the project as it developed, underscored to us how rich
and varied the scholarly terrain remained in terms of examining gender as
a state of “otherness.” Despite the continued scholarly interest in inter-
sections of gender and otherness as fertile interpretive territory amongst
the recent growth of other humanistic studies in this realm, there is a
lacuna regarding gender and sex as a mode of difference using a material-
focused approach.
Thus, we bring together a range of contributing authors who focus on
close readings of medieval and early modern material and visual culture,
alongside historical textual counterparts, as ways to facilitate a greater
understanding of the varied nature of premodern masculinities and femi-
ninities. The diverse methodologies used in this volume speak to how
scholars might unpack the meanings of various media—reliquaries, illu-
minated manuscripts, paintings, prints, and sculpture—by questioning the
semiotic language of iconography, form, theme, and display as elements
that contributed to the construction of material markers of culture, track-
ing the entangled intersections between makers, objects and audience
with works that were made for a varied constellation of patrons or viewers.
v
vi PREfACE
The struggle to conform to, or confound, culturally prescribed iden-
tities has been explored in a number of recent volumes. Most contri-
butions that address a range of ways in which difference is culturally
articulated focus on an historical or literary approach that primarily inter-
prets texts as the point of entry into a richer understanding of medieval
and early modern culture. for example, the Ashgate Research Companion
to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe provides a series of critical
structures that reveal how expansive, and necessary, gender has become
as a framework for the study of premodern culture. Recent publications
that investigate various aspects of social and cultural difference from
other disciplinary angles, notably Katherine Allen Smith and Scott Wells’
volume Negotiating Community and Difference in Medieval Europe, as
well as Cordelia Beattie and Kristen fenton’s volume Intersections of
Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages take up the question
of how social place and faith guides the formation of gender identity in
personal reflection and in the make up of religious community. Likewise,
Marianna G. Muraveya and Raisa Maria Toivo’s collection Gender In
Late Medieval And Early Modern Europe analyzes how social marginali-
zation can exert a powerful influence on public expressions of gender.
Research in these areas has given a greater voice to the role of com-
munity acceptance and exclusion as critical forces in structuring various
sacred and secular identities through the Middle Ages. By anchoring
our study in the realm of the visual world, this volume aims to illumi-
nate concepts of gender, difference, community, and self as indices of
cultural ideology. In considering the role of the individual within the
community, we encounter the slippages between shifting definitions
of premodern subjectivities that scholars continue to debate. Ronald
Ganze’s “Medieval Sense of Self ” adds a new dimension to the ongoing
discussion of an early modern emergence of the “self,” and the conscious
“self-fashioning” of individual identity proposed by Stephen Greenblatt
presents obstacles to theorizing the role of the “other” within scholarly
frameworks. In taking a cue from these key questions that articulate gen-
der and sex difference as one path by which the “other” is manifested,
the essays follow trajectories of continuity and change, and trace estab-
lished visual traditions as they cede territory to new, experimental ways of
visually communicating gender and difference as modalities of otherness.
While each author explores a particular facet of medieval or early modern
visual culture, they collectively coalesce around each object’s inherent
PREfACE vii
materiality to contribute to a new way of envisioning, constructing, or
reinforcing premodern gendered identity.
The variety of visual evidence that is considered in the essays here
argues for a rethinking of objects as signifiers of gender difference that
made an imprint on social inclusions and exclusions, national iden-
tity, physical appearance, religious ideology, legal authority, poverty,
and piety. That is to say, our approach to visual culture is not a study
of objects as passive receptacles for cultural context, rather, non-verbal
works can, and should, be comprehended as full participants in the con-
stant negotiation and renegotiation of gender constructs over centuries
of historical change. This essay collection in its parts and as a whole seeks
to give authority to the material artifact by exploring the multiplicity of
cultural reference points that intersect in the visual world.
Radford, Virginia, USA Carlee A. Bradbury
Blacksburg, Virginia, USA Michelle Moseley-Christian
Notes
1. T he origin of the topic, and the pairing of gender and otherness, grew
from thinking about the role of gender in terms of Cohen’s seminal piece
on “Monster Theory (Seven Theses).”
2. P oska, Couchman and McIver, eds., Ashgate Research Companion to
Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe.
3. S mith and Wells, eds., Negotiating Community and Difference in Medieval
Europe. Beattie and fenton, eds., Intersections of Gender, Religion, and
Ethnicity in the Middle Ages.
4. A global perspective on race, gender and religion as a framework for other-
ness from Baghdad to the British Isles is surveyed in the collected essays
from farmer and Pasternack, eds., Gender and Difference in the Middle
Ages. Literary criticism has likewise probed the contours of gender and
otherness in a more targeted fashion that has focused on concerns within
specific national boundaries in medieval and early modern texts.
5. S ee Ganze, “The Medieval Sense of Self,” 102–116, including his critique
of Stephen Greenblatt’s influential notion of Renaissance Self-Fashioning:
From More to Shakespeare. Goffman’s sociological work The Presentation of
Self in Everyday Life has influenced a number of early modern studies on
the subject. See also Smith, Masks of Wedlock: Seventeenth-Century Dutch
Marriage Portraiture and Chapman, Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits: A Study
in Seventeenth-Century Identity.
viii PREfACE
6. S ee, for example, freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History
and Theory; Kapferer, ed., Images of Power and the Power of Images:
Control, Ownership and Public Space, 1–8; for a discussion of “non-verbal”
modes of communication, see Molyneaux, ed., The Cultural Life of Images:
Visual Representation in Archaeology, 1–9.
a
ckNowledgemeNts
This volume is the result of fruitful collaboration amongst a wide variety
of people. We are so thankful to all of the contributors to this volume for
their excellent essays and dedication to this project.
We are grateful for the helpful comments supplied by the anonymous
reviewer. These insightful comments strengthened individual essays as
well as the volume as a whole.
Working with Palgrave and the New Middle Ages Series has been a
pleasure. In particular, Allie Bochicchio and Emily Janakiram have been
extremely helpful. Bonnie Wheeler established such a pioneering Series
and we are honored to be a part of it.
Our institutions, the College of Visual and Performing Arts at
Radford University and the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech,
have been quite supportive of this project through various resource
allocations.
ix